You seem to have some very unrealistic expectations on what people should be paying for content. For comparison, consider the current mainstream model of advertising supported media. Advertising is sold through a variety of schemes these days. The most useful for this comparison is called CPM. CPM is 'cost per mille,' or cost per *thousand* impressions. It ranges anywhere from $0.24 - $10 depending on the media, target audience, advertising market, etc. A CPM of $5 is a pretty good (if somewhat arbitrary) starting point. At $5 CPM, a media publisher will get around $0.005 ( half of a cent) per impression. Most media will have several adds, so if we assume 4 adds per publication, that gives us a value of around $0.02 per viewer. Everyone won't zap, and I don't know the numbers, but we'll assume 20% until someone who tracks it corrects us. This means that you should ask for zaps of $0.10 (around 380 sats) to replace an add revenue of $4 CPM.
TL;DR - you can really only expect a value of a couple of cents per viewer. You will need a following of 10-100k to make a living creating high quality content.
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I make my living by creating content right now. There are many ways. I don't use advertising, because I create high value add content for a niche audience, so the ad revenue numbers don't add up. To make 1000$, you can help 10 people with 100$ value or 10000 people with 0.1$ value. For me, the first one is better. I don't want many, but I want to help them specifically a lot. I even published a book and it's a bit more expensive than books with the same length, because I expect to sell less of them, but they should give readers more value.
What you say is what I'm saying - it is not very intellectually honest to say that people can make living out of zaps just because the tech is here. Yes, tech is here, but its use and numbers are not there yet. You will not get 100k people zapping you 0.1$ for content. Mainly because 100k active zappers that like your content are just not here.
What I'm saying is we should be honest and humble in what Nostr currently provides, while still having good visions.
It is always good to be rooted in reality. When you grow vision from a reality based soil, you have a chance.
What is not a good approach is to say people can make a living just because the tech is here. Tech is only one piece of the puzzle.
Ad revenue is not a good indicator I believe.
Ads are expensive for most advertisers (when you calculate cost per acquisition) and cheap for most content creators. The main reason is there is too much advertisement trying to catch attention, so it is race to the top for the advertisers, but actually not much is sold.
Ads as a revenue model works for the top mass-market creators (think pop stars), it usually does not even cover the costs of (online) magazines.
Most content creators actually make money by either affiliate programs that can be targeted better (but not always - for example the endless VPN ads in podcasts), or by selling the content directly.
I don't think it makes sense to compare ad revenue to zaps as the only thing, because that is not how most content creators actually make money. Ads sell attention (in somehow unrelated way to the content), while zaps should capture the value created by the content itself.
If I create interesting content and get paid for showing you an ad for hair shampoo, it is not related to the content. The point of value4value is to value the content itself, not your attention around the content.
So I would personally rather compare zaps to how you can monetize content and not how people monetize attention, which sounds similar, but it's actually a very different business proposition.